Intel continued its climb up the clock-speed ladder by launching the Core i9-14900KS, a “special edition” desktop chip that offers the very fastest clock speed of any current PC processor, at 6.2GHz. As expected, though, you’ll pay for it, at a price of $689.
But don’t expect this chip to easily outclass the competition, either. Intel acknowledged that in certain games, AMD’s recent Ryzen 7000X-series chips outperform it.
Last year, Intel announced the Core i9-13900KS, a 6.0GHz chip that superseded the fastest “normal” chip in Intel’s desktop lineup, the 5.8GHz Core i9-13900K. The current Core i9-14900K tops out at 6.0GHz. (All of these speeds represent the top speed under Intel’s Thermal Velocity Boost.) You can see the progression.
Otherwise, the fastest iteration of the 14th-gen Raptor Lake Refresh generation is…
